


All Swallowed in their Coats

by yet_intrepid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Matt Holt has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Past Abuse, Please Forgive Them, Secret Santa, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Snowed In, The Writer Knows Nothing About Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 11:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13122351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: Shiro and his new roommate, Matt, would tell you that they are nothing alike: Shiro is an overwhelmed grad student, while Matt is a dropout and avid science youtuber.But then there's a blizzard, and maybe things change.





	All Swallowed in their Coats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stover/gifts).



Sometimes, Shiro wonders why he’s doing this. And by this, he means…anything he’s ever done.

This time, he’s trekking home from the T station in the snow while he wonders. He’s got fifty essays from his intro to sociology students in his backpack, which he should’ve started grading a week ago, but he hasn’t had time. His last seminar paper for the semester is due tomorrow and his tutoring hours at his second job have been packed; he still has to finalize the paperwork for his thesis committee for next semester. It’s a mess. _He’s_ a mess. And on top of that, it’s fucking snowing.

And sure, this isn’t his first winter in Boston, but it’s still tough. Shiro grew up in L.A., after all, and he did his first master’s program in Nor Cal. New England is a big goddamn change: dark all the time, frigid, damp. His stump hates it almost more than his mental health does.

“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, hunching deeper into his coat. He can’t wait to get home. Yeah, it’ll be awful, with his new roommate Matt making all kinds of racket for whatever goddamn experiment he’s filming now, but at least there’ll be heat. Shiro can make some tea, maybe some pasta if he’s got enough energy. And then he’ll put in his headphones and buckle down on the grading for a couple hours before doing the final revisions to his paper.

The snow thickens as he goes, and when he’s finally hauled himself up the outdoor stairs to his third-floor apartment, he’s almost collapsing with stupid exhaustion. But he strips off his gloves and fumbles with his keys, dragging them out of his pocket and flipping clumsily through them till he finally shoves the right one into the lock. He braces himself for noise, chaos…Matt.

There’s nothing. There’s darkness.

He steps into the blackness of their cramped living room, stumbles on something, and reaches for a lightswitch.

Nothing. Darkness.

And in fact, Shiro notices, as he flips the lightswitch up and down in ridiculous hope that nothing is actually wrong, it’s not nearly as warm in the apartment as it should be.

He steps all the way in, digging for his phone in his heavy backpack, and shuts the door. Instantly, panic starts to itch in the back of his mind, but he squashes it down. There’s no time for his brain’s bullshit right now.

By the light of his phone, he crosses into the strip they call a kitchen and finds the lightswitch there. Flips it.

Nothing.

Darkness.

“Okay,” Shiro says aloud to himself. “Okay. You’re fine. Power’s out, but you’re fine—”

He’s not fine. He wants to sit down and bawl. It’s been a long-ass day, and he needs to grade, and all he wants is a cup of tea, and it’s _dark_.

“You’re fine,” he tells himself again, almost harshly, and he takes off his boots so he won’t track stray clumps of snow into his bedroom.

In his room, he digs out two clean pairs of socks and layers them. He’d like to change out of his work clothes, but even taking off his coat seems like a terrible idea. So he just climbs into bed in his dress pants and button-up and all their accompanying layers, and hides there.

It’s cold. It’s really cold. Shiro hates it.

You wanted it to be quiet, he reminds himself. And it is. Matt can’t film his goddamn experiments with no power—

Speaking of which, where is Matt?

Shiro, biting his lip, fumbles for his phone to send a text. It’s not like Matt answers to him or whatever, but he’d better at least check that Matt knows about the situation.

**Shiro:** hey, wanted to let you know the power’s out here.

Good enough. He hits send and watches the message deliver.

**Matt:** well shit

**Matt:** weather said we wouldn’t get the worst of it

**Matt:** guess that was bullshit lmao

**Matt:** home in 3

**Shiro:** okay!

He stays huddled in his bed until he hears the door open, hears the stomping of Matt’s boots on the rug. Then he tears himself away from the extra warmth and heads into the living room.

Matt looks miserable. Shiro doesn’t see him unhappy often, which makes the change even more apparent: the usual wild energy is gone, replaced by tense shoulders and arms defensively crossed. Shiro gets shivers that aren’t from the cold, but he yells at his brain again and pushes the rush of terror away.

“Hey Shiro,” Matt says. It sounds like the words are barely squeezing through his throat. “You done this before?”

“Done what?” Shiro asks.

“You know.” Matt shrugs. “The outage in a blizzard thing.”

It flashes: the shed in the mountains. The weak flicker of the bare bulb overhead. The cold of nightfall. And his arm—

“No,” Shiro says, ripping himself away from the memory. “No, not exactly.”

Matt quirks an eyebrow at him, but shrugs again. “We should gather all the supplies we’ve got and shut ourselves in one of the bedrooms to keep our body heat in. The closest place I know of with a generator is like a twenty-minute walk, and the storm’s really picking up. I think we’ll be off the grid for a day at least.”

Shiro’s breath catches. Cold, dark, and now tight spaces?

But there’s nothing to be done.

Matt’s relatively well prepared, he realizes in the next few minutes as they rush around collecting food and flashlights and waterbottles. He’s got a propane camping stove and a ridiculous supply of extra flashlight batteries. Shiro’s main contribution is grabbing the can opener after Matt stockpiles their canned food.

“My room or yours?” Shiro asks, when there’s a considerable stockpile of stuff on their third-hand couch.

“Is yours okay?” Matt asks. “You’ve got the attached half-bath, so we won’t have to lose heat running out to pee. No point showering when it’s this cold.”

“That’s fine,” says Shiro. “Can you bring in all your blankets?”

“Yep.” Matt disappears into his own room as Shiro picks up all the other supplies and deposits them on his dresser.

Shed. Light bulb. Nightfall. His arm—

No, Shiro tells himself firmly. He’s not going there. He’s not going to have flashbacks or whatever the hell these are when he’s stuck in a room with a near-stranger. He’s _not_.

But Haggar’s face keeps lurking at the corners of his vision, her cold eyes telling him that he’s not enough, that he can’t make her happy, that he’s bad. And Shiro hates how much he still believes that he should’ve done better, that if he’d been a better boyfriend she wouldn’t have snapped, wouldn’t have wrestled him into her trunk in his t-shirt and boxers in the winter mountain dusk and locked him in that shed—

“Shiro?”

Shiro jumps, and he hates that too. But when he turns, Matt looks almost as scared as he feels himself. So Shiro beckons him in and they settle on opposite ends of Shiro’s twin bed, each swathed in a mound of blankets and holding a flashlight.

“I hate power outages,” Matt says, leaning back against the wall and waving his flashlight so it makes figure eights on the ceiling.

“You seem like you know what to do with them, though,” Shiro counters, with a sigh. “At least, a lot more than I do.”

“Duh,” Matt says, but he’s grinning. “You’ve been here how long, like a week?”

Shiro rolls his eyes. “A year and a half.”

“So, like a week.” Matt’s grin slips. “And I only know what to do because of shitty experiences, anyway.”

The half-biting retort about having already survived a New England winter freezes on Shiro’s tongue. The air between him and Matt sparks with—well, with some kind of recognition. Their eyes meet, then dodge away.

And Shiro doesn’t know why he feels it, this burning need to confide. But he does know that if things get worse, if he panics, he’ll be glad to have explained some of the reasoning beforehand.

“Shitty experiences, huh,” Shiro says, lightly as he can. “I’ve got some of those.”

“Oh yeah?” Matt’s tone is casual too, forced.

“Yeah,” Shiro answers. “Come on, you can’t tell me you never wondered what happened to my arm.” He waves his 3D-printed prosthetic.

“Once or twice,” says Matt. “But you don’t have to—”

“I know,” Shiro says.

Silence.

Shed, light bulb, Haggar’s face. Shed, light bulb, duct tape, nightfall—

His arm. His _arm_.

Silence.

“But if you want to—” Matt’s voice shakes. “If you want to, I know sometimes it’s better when people know.”

Shiro looks at him. “How do you know that?”

“Like I said,” Matt says. “Shitty experiences.”

“Fair,” Shiro answers. “But don’t laugh. It’ll sound dumb when I say it.”

“I won’t laugh,” Matt says.

Shed. Nightfall. Bare bulb swinging. His arm—

“My ex was abusive.” The words are still strained when he speaks them, even all these years later. Even after the police report, the arrest, the prison sentence. “One day she—one day she snapped. She went through my phone, saw that I was thinking about leaving her. So she locked me up in this shed in the mountains and—yeah. Frostbite’s a hell of a thing.”

Matt doesn’t laugh. Just breathes heavy, shakes his head.

“Damn,” he says. “How long ago? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Three years.”

Matt swirls to look at him. “No way!”

“What do you mean, no way?”

“Me too,” Matt says. “I mean, uh. My abusive ex. About three years ago. We didn’t date very long; she moved here in the fall of my junior year at MIT and I met her at a bar and then there was the blizzard and I realized what she was really like and like two weeks later the cops showed up, said she’d attacked some guy out on the west coast—”

Shed. Light bulb. His arm, duct tape, nightfall.

Shiro barely breathes.

“Weird, huh,” says Matt. He does laugh now, frail and shaking. “Anyway, I think she’s in prison now. Hope yours is too.”

Shiro nods, then clarifies. “She is.”

“Weird,” Matt says again. “Just…weird.”

“Her name was Haggar,” Shiro blurts out, and that recognition sparks between them again as Matt slowly turns his head, meets Shiro’s eyes.

Silence. Bare bulb flickering—

Cold shed, nightfall—

Shiro doesn’t know where he is. His eyes are glued shut with fear.

His arm, his arm, and her eyes. Her inhumanly strong fingers gripping his chin—

Silence—

Shiro gasps in a breath. Someone’s talking. He can barely hear the voice, but it doesn’t sound like her. It sounds soothing and panicked all at once.

“—hey, Shiro, hey, slow down, breathe with me, okay?”

He tries to listen. Tries to pull himself out.

“Hey, okay, in—and out. In—and out.”

Shiro can’t do it. He’s too stuck, hyperventilating too hard. He shakes his head, desperate and apologetic.

Cold shed nightfall his arm his arm and her eyes—

Bare bulb and flicker and flicker and flicker—

He wrenches his eyes open. It’s still dark, but Matt’s flashlight is waving anxious figure eights on the ceiling.

“Shiro,” Matt says, “do you know where you are?”

Shiro hesitates. Nods.

“Can you tell me?”

“Bedroom,” Shiro forces out. “Boston. Power outage.”

“That’s right,” Matt says, “that’s good. You wanna talk about it or do you want a distraction?”

Shiro hesitates again. “Talk about it.”

“Okay,” Matt says. “You were—you were thinking about her? Haggar?”

“Yeah,” says Shiro. “Matt, you—”

Silence. Nightfall, her eyes—

No.

“When I said her name,” Shiro picks up again, determined, “you seemed like you recognized it.”

Matt gives that frail laugh again. “Yeah,” he says. “I do. I mean, it’s weird as hell, right? But how many abusive exes named Haggar can there really be?”

“Weird as hell,” Shiro repeats.

They shift closer to each other. Matt reaches out a hand, rubs Shiro’s back.

“This okay?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Shiro leans into the touch, takes a deep breath. “Haggar was her last name, but she went by it. Honerva, I think? First name Honerva.”

“That’s the one,” Matt says. He shakes his head. “Weird, huh.”

“Weird,” says Shiro, and then: “Man, her eyes…I always think about her eyes.”

“Me too,” Matt says. “And how cold her hands were.”

Shiro shudders. “Yeah. Cold and strong.”

Silence again, but this time Shiro doesn’t feel alone in it, doesn’t feel zapped out of time and place. Silence, but this time it’s comforting. Matt’s hand circles steady over Shiro’s shoulder blades, and Shiro’s hand rests on Matt’s blanket-swaddled knee.

“I need to grade,” Shiro mutters. “And edit my seminar paper.”

“You always need to grade,” Matt retorts gently. “Come on, dude. Let yourself chill out for a minute. School’s probably getting canceled tomorrow anyway.”

“I thought we were trying to stay warm, not chill out,” Shiro says, and Matt laughs. The air sparks between them again, and Shiro knows something has changed.

“Let’s make tea,” Matt says after a moment, clawing out of his blankets to find the camping stove. “You brought the tea in here, right?”

“Of course I brought the tea,” Shiro says, mock-offended. He reaches for his backpack and hauls out the intro to sociology essays. “Who do you think I am?”

Their eyes meet. Shiro isn’t sure how that question became serious, but somehow it did.

“I think you’re a brave person,” Matt says. “A really, really brave person.”

“So are you,” Shiro replies. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, why he does anything he ever does, but he gets up, dragging his blankets with him, and wraps his arms around Matt. “We’ve made it though worse than this, huh?”

“Yeah,” Matt says. “Yeah, we have.”

In the cold darkness of Shiro’s bedroom, they hold each other.


End file.
